Reconciled
by Punzie the Platypus
Summary: Getting off the phone with Shawn (who's in San Fran), Henry, feeling sentimental, looks over the Spencer Family scrapbook and reminiscences over the postcards Shawn had sent him during his years away from Santa Barbara.


**_Soli Deo gloria_**

**DISCLAIMER: I do NOT own Psych. Henry is one of my favorite characters: he and Shawn balance out practicality and immaturity.**

"So that basically sums up my first two hours in San Francisco," Shawn's voice said at the end of Henry's phone. "The officer who pulled us over for speeding is the nicest guy once you get to know him, though. Name's Fred, has two daughters and an irrational fear of hedgehogs."

Henry leaned against his kitchen chair, the legs up in the air. He could see quite vividly how this had all played out. He didn't get lost in the rush of an action-packed car chase, though: "So what about the ring, Shawn?"

Shawn's sigh was audible and annoyed. "It is being worn by one of my fiancee's pretty little fingers as we speak. Yeah, yeah, she's holding her hand up. Ah, it looks beautiful. Yeah, we've got it accounted for. Pretty sure we could've gotten a nice new one and had had spending money left over from the insurance money if it had come to that, though."

Henry was silent for a moment, just so Shawn could actually go over the words he just said and see if they made any sense to him. Then he said, "Family heirlooms don't have a price tag, Shawn."

Shawn laughed, albeit quickly and awkwardly to make up for his usual lack of decorum. "Dad, I joke. See, I interwove humor in with my answer to your question."

"Surrrrreeeee, Shawn." Henry straightened up, sighing as he felt a crack in his back. "Gus is going to look for a house now?"

"He's crashing on the sofa until then, but yeah. Which means we're going to take a weekend and load up a moving van and the Blueberry. THAT is going to be fun. Especially after I made a lot of effort into making goodbyes and everything. Could get awkward."

"Stop by when you do, Shawn."

"It might not be soon, and like Lassie wants me crashing his house. He says I keep waking up Lilly from her nap. I don't do that; I'm stealthy, like a cheetah."

"Come by and see me before I leave."

"I'll meet up with ya, Pops. We'll schedule when I have an actual sense of time. Or maybe I'll just pop out of the woodwork and give you a heart attack."

"Let's hope you have a car by then to take me to the hospital," said Henry, ever dismal and realistic and the pessimist. "See ya, kid."

Shawn sounded more sincere. "See ya, Dad."

Henry sighed to himself as he hung up his phone and set it on the charger. Then he looked around his house with a deep feeling of grief. Things were changing, and he was moving on. Moving on from a very long and yet a very short age of his life. Leaving this house was a great, long transition. So many things had happened here; so many things had happened to him in this house: he had raised Shawn in this house, become a detective at the SBPD during that time, been divorced from his wife, estranged from his son, and then gotten reconciled with them both. Now that boy who dug holes in the backyard with Burton Guster and attempted to ride his bike over a ramp before the house was engaged and five hours away upstate. It had been an era started when Shawn came back to Santa Barbara. Henry still remembered how it had been an almost hesitant email from Gus that informed him of his son's seemingly permanent return to his childhood town. He remembered finding Shawn's apartment after a mishap with the wrong arrangement of the numbers on his PO box and seeing his son for the first time. He hadn't expected him to look any different from the years when he hadn't seen him. He'd been older in body and yet still as immature in spirit and personality. Henry could see it now as clearly as he had eight years ago. And those were eight years past, now. At last Shawn grew up (which is a flexible definition of his current behavior) and that crazy, frustrating, hilarious era was over, gone. Everyone was . . . moving on.

Henry resigned himself to this and stood up, looking over his house for perhaps one of the last times. Everything had been snapped up and thrust into the crackly cushion of newspapers and the darkness of flaps of closed cardboard. All that was left were the appliances, all looking plain and old but still functional, and memories that brought a wry smile to Henry's face. Ghosts glowed everywhere in the bright late afternoon light.

Henry walked to the living room, which was bereft of all his little eccentric personal touches, save a bookshelf containing the last row of books to shove into a plastic container for his new storage unit. He walked past the coffee table and the old slouchy sofa and stood in front of the bookshelf. His finger buzzed back and forth across the line until he stopped at a binder. Pulling it out, he stared at the front for a moment: it read in Maddie's handwriting 'The Spencer Family album.'

Henry smiled at the familiar title and sat down comfortably on the old couch. The Lassiters were bringing in their own nicer, newer furniture, and this old couch was going in a storage unit as well. Henry was feeling awfully sentimental, which was a rare fit of feeling for him.

Opening the album, he skimmed and turned the pages of the early years of the Spencers. He and Maddie in their 70s' wedding outfits, pregnant Maddie and then baby Shawn. Shawn and Gus eating mud as toddlers and playing in the sprinkler and becoming quite the little nerds from an early age. He didn't spend so much time on these as he was looking more forward to the newer additions to the album. Soon Shawn and Gus got through their rough puberty spots until it was graduation and Shawn was grinning while Gus looked indignant as he punched his graduation cap into a wearable, Magic Head shaped accessory. Then the pictures ceased. Shawn had ceased to exist; at least, physically: The next of the laminated pages were of those from across the United States, some wrinkled, others stained with coffee or slushies or snipped by an ice skate sharpener.

For Shawn and Henry got along as a student as good as his teacher and his teacher could. Two terribly clever men, one strict and firm, the other shaking his head. Their spats had continued from the divorce through senior year. Then Shawn just up and left. Leaving his father and his best friend, he went across the United States for years—on that motorcycle, too, of all the damn things!

Of course Shawn and Gus had been on good terms the entire while of his absence. But Shawn and Henry had had a quick argument the day before he left. It had almost been banter, but it had been bitter, pointed words against each other. Henry was sure his son was tired of his existence and even ran along the line of hating him, and hadn't expected any correspondence from him. Good riddance to his screwup offspring.

But then one early summer Saturday, Henry had gotten the mail and his eyes squinted, his heart stopping, when he saw familiar handwriting on a postcard. Flipping the card over, he saw his son's telltale sign of current residence: the WELCOME TO LAS VEGAS sign. Checking the return address, he got nothing but Shawn S., Reno, NV. Sighing, he expected the worst going in to read the short message from his son; probably some of Shawn's usual bragging and exaggeration of the truth, making himself sound better than he was. So imagine the surprise that was on his face when he read in a simple, direct hand. "Got hired at a place called Es Lo Maximo Party People. Filled a very specific position; they were _overjoyed_ to have me. I analyze handwriting. Half of people writing should stick to printing in big, block letters. It's like reading chicken scratch half the time. But I get paid, so I guess there is a point. Shawn."

That was all. Henry sighed and leaned against his mailbox; he supposed he could march himself down there, drag his protesting, disgusted son into his pickup and drive him home, leaving his motorcycle there, and have him lie on his couch, unapproachable and temperamental, until he regretted it. Nah. He wouldn't do that.

He left the postcard by the phone and tried to forget that it had been _him_ who taught Shawn to analyze other's handwriting, their little quirks and mannerisms in shaping the letters and dotting the i's and cross the t's; he had caught a classmate in forgery and begrudgingly given his father his due credit.

Henry flipped past that one and got to the categorized Californias. Shawn had gone up and down the state in that two month stage: small, almost-reluctant accounts of his being an ice skate sharpener, hummer limousine driver, master of ceremonies for improv night, triangle sales representative, and an acupuncturist were inscripted on the back of the beautiful scenes of classic California. One was a souvenir photo of Shawn's face along with a few other people's in a cut out of frumpy old people at a beach boardwalk. Henry hadn't been surprised that Shawn was hanging out with the throngs of people; Shawn made friends wherever he went. He was charming, charismatic, humorous, talkative, and engaging. No wonder he won in on so many interviews. And no wonder he'd lost so many jobs. Henry laughed to himself as he read Shawn's '. . . oh, so I lost that job as a frog wrangler at Shaker Heights . . . apparently blowing up a frog like a balloon isn't socially acceptable or encouraged to be done in front of little children,'; one of many of his ever muttered confessions of lost jobs. Shawn was, above all, the opposite of humble; it took all of him to squash down his pride enough to admit that he wasn't perfect at everything. Henry remembered being worried by his continued streak of lost jobs. But Shawn always sounded optimistic of new opportunities and was always bragging about a new interview or a friend of a friend he was going to meet. He never sounded miserable, though Henry was sure he was at times. He hadn't his father to challenge him or Gus to keep him on the straight and narrow.

Henry had never replied to the postcards. He knew the moment he sent off a postcard Shawn was streaking down a new highway off to a new city. They'd never reach him. Also: he didn't know what to say. Shawn had a way of ignoring certain issues at hand and remaining lighthearted and decidedly ignorant, or forgettable. Henry couldn't pick up something so heavy without Shawn picking up the slack. So he stayed silent.

And the stack of postcards grew and grew. Pretty soon Henry hadn't known what to do with them. Sometimes Gus would come over and update about his life and his own correspondences with Shawn and then stare queerly at the stack. He looked them over and said, "He's busy."

"Yep."

"What are you doing to do with these, anyway?" Gus asked, replacing them by the phone.

Henry sighed and shrugged. He hadn't thrown them away, so that had to mean something. Perhaps . . . he realized after time it was because Shawn rarely reached out to him, if ever, and those postcards were a precarious but steady way of communication. He couldn't bring himself to get rid of his son's handwriting or adventures or humor or consistency; he loved his son.

For a few years, the postcards had a career serving their lives out as beer coasters. But Henry felt guilty by using them so, so they resumed their towering by the phone. But then, finally, the postcards were threaded into the Spencer family album. And soon the rate of postcards grew slower and slower, and Henry became worried and then realistic: his son's streak of conscience was over.

But then he heard a motorcycle had returned to Santa Barbara. Of course there was a reasonable, logical explanation.

So in the end, all those postcards were here in the scrapbook, each a memory of a few of Shawn's days gone from SB kept safely hidden away under a film of plastic.

And Henry stayed there for hours, reveling in the nostalgia and sentimentality of the day. He leaned his head against his hand, had one leg crossed over the other, and read the penned words and saw the pictures on the back of the cards, one hand flipping the pages until it came to a single solitary page void of postcards and left only with a picture of him, Shawn, Maddie, and Gus. Just the four of them, the entire family (Gus was an honorary Spencer; that was just common knowledge), from a couple months ago.

Henry smiled to himself and caught the last line of Shawn's last postcard: '. . . and maybe I'll go see Bud. You know I love reruns.' Henry, in retrospect, should've caught the slight clue foreboding Shawn's return. Looking back, in fact, every one of Shawn's postcards that didn't mention another city he was heading to was actually alluded to in the subtlest of words. Henry could have slapped himself when he noticed this and reread the postcards years ago. Now, Henry just thought that Shawn thought he was a little funny, having inside jokes with his father. Shawn had played a game Henry should've caught on sooner; after all, it had been him who taught his son how to play.

The album was then closed with a gentle thump. Henry closed his eyes and shook his head; he wasn't crying, but he was feeling very deeply all those months and years of bitterness and sharp retorts and anger between him and his son. He was thankful for the little memories laced with the slightest of apologies from Shawn, but he was more glad for the here and now the two had. Reconciled, differentiating, but finally, after years and years, finally understanding.

***Sighs deeply* *Smiles a little* Thanks for reading! God bless!**


End file.
